


shake my tomb

by scorpiod



Category: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown - Holly Black
Genre: Animal Death, Blood Drinking, Blood Sharing, Bloodplay, Blow Jobs, Cunnilingus, F/M, M/M, Multi, Self-Harm, Starvation, Threesome - F/M/M, Trick or Treat: Trick, Vampire Bites, Vampire Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-11 13:02:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16476068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scorpiod/pseuds/scorpiod
Summary: In which 88 days stretches out into eternity, and Tana is so very cold.





	shake my tomb

**Author's Note:**

  * For [opheliahyde](https://archiveofourown.org/users/opheliahyde/gifts).



> This is sort of a combo of several of your prompts for this fandom. I hope you enjoy! 
> 
> Title taken from Deftones' _you've seen the butcher_.
> 
> See endnotes for more explanation regarding some of the warnings.

 

_ There’s a ladder down here. _ _   
_ _ He built it for me _ _   
_ _ and he cried the whole time. _ _   
_ _ When the dead cry _ _   
_ __ it looks like laughing.

_ —  _ Catherynne M. Valente _ , A Silver Splendour, A Flame _

  
  
  


**DAY THREE**

 

Today's meal is a can of peaches.

 

The syrup is sticky and sweet, the fruit soft and borderline bland. It tastes okay, as good as canned fruit can taste. When she closes her eyes, she can almost pretend the syrup is blood. 

 

Blood is thicker, Tana remembers. Heavier. 

 

When she opens her eyes, Gavriel is staring at her, like he was looking deep down inside her, picking apart her imaginings. 

 

She shudders, glancing back down at her food, away from his knowing eyes. 

 

“How is the hunger today?” he asks. 

 

She swallows the peaches. Tana has to force it down her throat, like she needs to think about the process of eating, how to chew and swallow when it used to come natural. 

 

“It's—” she starts, halting, tonguing her sharpened canines, “—okay.  I think when I drank your blood, that gave me a boost.” Gavriel's blood, the blood he drained out of an ancient vampire, the blood she consumed and wanted more of.  _ Accumulated toxins,  _ that's what they called it _. _ She's not like Aidan, who was looking at her like a pork chop within minutes. 

 

Not yet, anyway. There's no human to drool over in this basement. 

 

“It just hurts right now.”

 

It's only day three. eighty-five more to go. She can make it. 

 

Tana sleeps and dreams of her mother and blood. It doesn't taste like strawberry anymore, like in her little kid dreams. It tastes sharp and metallic and sets her veins on fire.   
  


  
  


**DAY FOUR**

  
  


Gavriel reads to her. 

 

His voice is smooth and melodic, deceptively gentle. Today he is reading cosmo magazine, which contains gems like  _ How To Dress To Flaunt Your Neck  _ and  _ Crotch Crisis: 4 Scary Things Gynos Won’t Tell You _ . Hearing the absurd, high school girl worries fly from Gavriel’s lips made her laugh. Yesterday it was a manga she's never heard of, something he picked out of the bottom bargain bin of some Coldtown pawnshop. 

 

It doesn't really matter, what he reads, she just likes the sound of his voice. She likes staring at his mouth, his eyelashes, when he concentrates on text. 

 

She shivers and he stops, glancing up at her. 

 

“Don't stop,” she tells him. “Keep reading. When you stop, I keep thinking about blood.” 

 

_ Gavriel isn't food _ , she thinks, which is an awful, sick thing to think, to have to remind herself of. Gavriel is the scariest person she's ever known, but she wonders if she can convince him to let her drink his blood again, that if she crawled in his lap and asks more, he'll cave to her and her wants.  _ Cold forever,  _ she reminds herself, wondering if she'll turn into some monstrous cannibalistic vampire, devouring and drinking to sate a never ending thirst. 

 

She shakes and wraps her arms around her knees. She's wearing her poncho, but she's never warm anymore. “Please,” she says. “Please, Gavriel.” 

 

He sleeps with her that night, wraps his arm around her. He doesn't feel alive. He is almost as cold as she is—dead skin, inhuman stillness. It used to be unnerving, but Tana doesn't care anymore. 

 

Tana thinks about how she could bite him, this close, pressed up against his body, his arms around her. 

 

Take his wrist into her mouth and  _ rip rip rip  _ with her sharp teeth. Maybe her fangs will grow longer.

 

Instead, she runs her fingers over his lips. His eyes flutter open, staring at her. 

 

“You're so beautiful _,_ ” she tells him, voice hushed.

 

His mouth twitches. “The better to eat you with,” he says. 

 

That's not how it goes, but she laughs anyway. 

  
  


**DAY FIVE**

  
  


“I can't stop thinking about blood,” she tells her audience. “If I listen really closely, I think I can smell it, above me. Just faintly. Hear someone's heart thumping far away.”

 

She closes her eyes and focuses. All she hears is her own slowed heartbeat. “There are three brass locks on this door. Fifty three links in this chain. It helps to remind myself of that.”

 

Her voice is weak, body shaky. She can feel the Cold in her bones and her lips are turning blue, the tips of her fingers. _I'm a smurf,_ she told Gavriel when she woke up, laughing, the edge of something manic creeping into her voice. She can feel it, creeping up in her. Soon it'll turn her whole body Cold. 

 

Gavriel lounges in the background while she does a live streaming update. He looks indecent, shirt open, entirely too comfortable on the blankets and dirty ground. Tana can imagine the comments rumbling through the blogosphere, about shacking up with an old vampire, about how she may as not even bother trying to stay human, if she's just going to fuck one. 

 

“Food is...hard,” she says, wincing. “It's hard to remember I have to eat. Gavriel has to remind me.”

 

Words are difficult. Thinking is difficult. It's getting harder and harder to focus on herself, remembering to be human—stay human. 

 

Her stomach doesn't growl. It claws at her, like sharp icicles stabbing at her. 

 

“It's funny. When this happened to my mom, she was able to...trick me. Convince me, to let her out. She had...thought capacity and manipulation. It'd been thirty-two days by then. ”

 

She trails off. She doesn't have words, slipping through her mind, falling through the cracks. 

 

She shuts the camera off, the bite on her throat throbbing with Cold. Takes a breath. 

 

“Your mother was likely not manipulating you,” Gavriel says behind her, softly. “She likely convinced herself she could never hurt you. That she was strong enough to follow through on her promises once you freed her.”

 

Tana makes a choking noise in the back of her throat and Gavriel cuts himself off. She can't look at him.

 

“It's okay,” she tells him. “There's no point in sugar coating anything.”

 

“I'm not,” he says. “We all convince ourselves of certain illusions to endure.”

 

Not for the first time, Tana thinks about her looming eighty-eight days. Eighty-three now. She wants to ask Gavriel to be honest with her, if he thinks she’s just putting off the inevitable. 

 

But if tells her, she might ask him to let her go, to set her free. Worst yet, he might agree. 

 

With him here, it feels less like a prison sentence and more like a long game of seven minutes in Heaven, but it can't last. 

 

Her mother’s wails echo in her head, and under that, her father putting a shovel through her neck. 

 

She stumbles when she gets up, Gavriel appearing by her side, to help her up. She leans into him, pressing her face against his throat, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. She allows herself to breathe, nuzzle her nose against his skin and her cradles her softly, stroking her hair. 

 

When her fangs graze his skin, he pushed her away, quick like lightning, held at arm's length and Tana— 

 

Tana pulls her lips back in a snarl for a split second before she realizes what she's done, about to do, her mind supplying her with images of tender flesh and dark blueish blood, images she tries to will away. It's not as terrifying as it should be. Mostly she just  _ craves.  _

 

“I wasn't going to,” she protests, but they both know that’s a lie.  

 

“You'd have to start all over again,” he reminds her. Gavriel’s voice is easy, calm, like he’ll give it to her if she asks nicely, as long as she knows the risks. “It'll ease the hunger; it'll make you stronger. But you won't get any better.”

 

_ We're never going to be fine again,  _ Aidan said, right before he drank human blood. 

 

“I know,” she whispers, “I know.” She puts her arms around him, a surge of desperation throbbing under her skin.

 

“Kiss me,” she tells him and he obeys, mouth strangely soft, lips cold against hers. 

  
  


**DAY SIX**

 

The times Gavriel isn't here with her are the worst. He has to go, for about an hour each day—to bring back more food, more items to busy herself with, more supplies, but also to keep himself fed and healthy. 

 

He can't starve down here with her. They'd rip each other apart. 

 

_ Starve,  _ she thinks, shoving down a laugh that threatens to spill out. The whole point is to starve herself out. She takes a bite out of the canned beans she opened up. It doesn't taste like anything anymore. 

 

She brings her fingers up to her fangs. They're small, almost cute, not terrifying vampire length, but sharp enough to prick her fingers. Fangs aren't made for eating cold beans. 

 

A small tendril of blood runs down her index finger. Tana leans to lick it off her skin and frowns when the taste hits her tongue. Even her blood is Cold. 

 

When the first brass lock turns, Tana gets up and walks to the door, as far as her chain will let her. She waits for Gavriel like an eager dog, the chain pulled tauntly across the room. It doesn't give. 

 

He returns with more food, colored markers, unlined white paper and a bottle of vodka. He holds it up with a sheepish look that was odd on his features. “I don't know what you drink,” he says.

 

“I don't drink wine,” she says. He laughs at her and for a moment, there's a lightness in his eyes and she thinks she can do this.

 

She draws like she's back in art class, no easel or canvass for her but crude paper and markers—it feels like a metaphor for her current situation. 

 

Palm trees. Birds. An ocean. Sun rays. A bright sprawling world. 

 

She draws a rudimentary picture of Pearl, turning her bright and alight like a fairy tale princess, her long pigtails and her overalls, and the garnet necklace she gave her. Pearl will be thirteen later this year, and she'll miss it, and miss every other year if she doesn't make it through on the other side. 

 

She wants to hang it up, glue it to the walls of her cellar, to remind herself why she needs to endure this.

 

It's so easy to get lost down here. There has to be more than this cellar. There's something more out there than just this gnawing hunger.

  
  


**DAY SEVEN**

  
  


“I miss Aidan,” she says when Gavriel returns today. She hasn't brought him up since she's been locked up—thought maybe it was rude to talk about her ex to her new boyfriend ( _ if Gavriel is her boyfriend now; that's a funny thing to think—what kind of girl dates the undead? The pre-undead? _ ), but right now, it's hard to care about things like being polite or social graces. “How is he?”

 

“He's adapting,” Gavriel says, as he gets on the ground with her. He curls up in her lap, like he could sleep there, and it's oddly warm, makes her heart flutter in her chest. “He misses you too.”   
  


She feels like he is leaving something out, something more, evading some truth to make her feel better, but before she can open her mouth to ask, Gavriel shoots her a look. 

 

“Don't worry,” he reassures her. “I'll keep him safe in Coldtown.”

 

“You have to try hard. Aidan loves trouble,” she jokes, trying to feel better about everything that's changed. Hard to believe Aidan was just her ex a week ago, and all she had to worry about was running into him at parties.

 

“Tell me a story,” she asks him, changing the subject, running her fingers in his black curls. He is curled up in the nest of blankets with her, his head on her lap, like they are both kids. 

 

She is still a kid, she thinks. Still seventeen. It's hard to remember. 

 

Gavriel chuckles. “What kind of story? I have more Russian fairy tales for you.”

 

“Tell me something awful,” she says. “Something true.” Gavriel goes still, except for the arch of his eyebrow, the very subtle head tilt. 

 

“I'm not fragile,” she protests, placing a finger to his lips. Her fingers must be so Cold. They can't feel good against his skin. She has a childish flicker of worry she's no longer attractive, especially to him.  _ I'm no longer a pretty young thing filled with hot, pumping blood. I am now sick teenage girl.  _ “I know you think you're going to freak me out. You're going to scare me. I'm gonna realize what a so-called monster you are and kick you out and run away and—”

 

“Tana—” 

 

“I'm not, okay?” She lets out a shaky, shuddering breath. “I wanna hear it.”

 

He sits up, staring at her, eyes glimmering in the dark like a cat’s. “I have a great many deal of awful tales, Tana.” His smile is small, harsh. “It's difficult to know where to start.”

 

He lies back down in her lap, looking away from her and Tana wonders if she is demanding too much from him, asking for this, if he's not going to tell her when— 

 

“I was Cold for two weeks,” he starts. 

 

_ Oh _ . This story. 

 

“Go on,” she says, waiting for her permission. 

 

Gavriel tells her about the first week wasn't bad, because he was drinking every night from Lucian. Tana hates the image of that in her brain. She hates especially the way she feels all light headed thinking about it. 

 

“What happened after?” She asks, when he tells her about the girl in the green dress, the Lucian had presented to him for his first kill, the one Lucian killed anyway because he was awful.

 

“I ran,” Gavriel says. He makes sure to meet her gaze for this. His tone is so gentle as soothing as a lullaby and his words so awful just like she wanted. “I wanted to get as far away from Paris as possible. I went to Marseille, and stayed in an inn, when I realized how painful it was to be Cold without Lucien's guidance.”

 

Tana sucks in a sharp breath and Gavriel pauses for her, waiting, wondering perhaps if he should continue. Tana knows what comes next. It's the same old story every time.

 

“Tell me,” she asks.

 

“I gave into my hunger,” he says to her. “I killed everyone in that inn—the owner, his wife, the maids, their children, the stablehands. I devoured until I had my fill and then drunk on blood, continued to feast.”

 

Tana is frozen. It is a little like pressing a knife against her skin, against her still beating pulse. Like going sixty, seventy on an icy road at night. She needs to feel that moment, that edge where the danger gets just a little too much. 

 

“What did it feel like?” She asks, breathlessly. 

 

“Nothing. It felt like nothing. I couldn't feel a thing.”

 

Her voice chokes on a sob. Gavriel pulls away, turning away from her and she reaches out, grabs him as hard as her weak hands manage, burying her face in his skin.

  
  
  


**DAY EIGHT**

 

She is shaking and shuddering with Cold and hunger when she climbs on top of him while he sleeps, dark lashes heavy and drowsy on his face, his body corpse still. She can't sleep—sleeps in fits, in shakes, in small stolen moments, but sleep is hard to chase when she is so hungry.

 

The Cold won't let her rest.

 

She curls up on his chest, straddling him. Distantly, she thinks this isn't how she wanted to be on top of Gavriel at any point, isn't what she imagined, when she let herself imagine doing more with Gavriel than kissing him. Instead, her mind rushes a mile a minute, thinking about how much better she'd feel if she got just a little of Gavriel _ ' _ s blood, if she had just a small taste, thinking about how the taste vampire blood lit a fire inside her, warmed her when the Cold was getting to her. Eighty-eight days feels far too long right now. Eighty days, still just as long.

 

Tana reaches out and fingers the jugular vein of his throat, blue against his pale skin. No pulse against her fingers, but he smells good all the same. All the smells in this cellar, including her, are rank, except for him. 

 

She closes one hand around his throat. 

 

Gavriel bats his dark eyelashes. His red eyes trail across her face, her body, the hand on his throat, assessing and horribly calm. 

 

“I want to take a bite out of your throat,” she confesses. Her voice trembles with something not fear.

 

“Why don't you?” he asks. His eyes are unreadable. He tilts his head back, giving her more access and Tana gasps, taking deep shuddering breaths. 

“Don't ask me that,” she says. Breathing techniques. Exhale. In and out. Eyes closed. Her hand squeezes. “You can't do that.”

 

_ You're supposed to protect me from myself _ , she thinks, but she doesn't say that, just leans down and presses her teeth against cool skin— 

 

The breath goes out of her, startled as Gavriel rises, rushes her, spins her over until she her back hits the blankets. She makes an undignified yelp. 

 

Gavriel pins her, his hand on her throat, not painful but firm, holding her down, the whole weight and strength of him like an immovable wall. Her breath comes in short pants. 

 

She feels very stupid, a wave of embarrassment rolling in her guts. She'd be red with it if she weren't so cold.  _ What was she thinking? _

 

Gavriel just stares at her with a curiosity she can't place. He doesn't seem very mad about almost taking a bite out of his throat. 

 

“I'm sorry,” she says. Her eyes are wet. She shuts them tight, to prevent tears from spilling. She doesn't want him to see her cry. “What's wrong with me?” she asks no one in particular. “I'm not supposed to be hungry for vampire blood.” 

 

_ What kind of a monster am I? _

 

“When you're starving, you’ll take what you can get,” he says, running his hand down her side, closing around her hips. He's cold, hasn't fed since yesterday and she shivers. It feels very dangerous, but she doesn't know who is the bigger threat now.

 

_ More dangerous than daybreak,  _ she thinks. 

 

“It's natural,” he says. He takes the hand off his throat and grabs her hand, bringing it up to his lips to kiss her knuckles. “I ripped out the Spider's throat, because he was nearby, because I hadn't been fed a meal in so long.”

 

“I'm so hungry,” she whines.

 

“I know,” he says, leans down, kisses her wrist. Kisses along the forearm like some romantic gentleman. Kisses the bitemark at the bend of her elbow, her mother's teeth marks. Tana gasps, arches up for more.

 

“I can make it easier on you,” he whispers in a low voice, something dark and tangible in his words that felt delicious and wrong. “I can't give you my blood, but I can give you some relief.”

 

His eyes gaze heavy down into her, his fingers curling possessively into her hip. 

 

When it clicks what he's saying, she feels embarrassingly flustered, it almost shocks her out of her hunger. 

 

“I've...I’ve never done that.”

 

He arches his eyebrows, and backs off, pulling away from her.

 

“No, no,” she protests. She grabs for his hands again, wraps her arm around his neck. “I want to. I’m just so gross right now, I haven't showered since I got to Coldtown. I'm not even shaved down there. I haven't shaved  _ anything  _ in so long.” 

 

He grins at her, sharp teeth and all. 

 

“The things you mortals get so concerned about...” he trails off, laughing quietly to himself. He kisses her, gently, on the lips and she can't resist rising up to meeting, search for his mouth, tongue meeting hers. 

 

He pulls away with smile. “Women didn't shave when I was mortal. Do you truly think that'd bother me?”

 

She doesn't know how to answer that. Thinking, holding on to thoughts is hard. The hunger throbs under her veins. 

 

That feeling of a near miss car crash, cutting her own brake lines overtakes her and before she can doubt herself, she tugs her shirt off. She tugs her bra off too, keeping her eyes on Gavriel, watching the way they widen with surprise, the way it stoked something still warm and living inside her, and just a little wicked. 

 

It feels like being back at that party with Aidan, and the boy they both made out, whose name she can't even remember, but she remembers it felt terrifying and exhilarating. 

 

It feels like that, when Gavriel kisses her collarbone, his fangs teasing skin and never breaking. When he runs his tongue over her breast, teasing her nipple, one right after the other, and she wraps her hands in his hair to tug him closer. 

 

When he slides down her body, pulling her pants then underwear off, mouths at her belly and almost tickling her with his hair as the locks hang in his face. 

 

She runs her hands in his dark curls, and tugs a little too hard, pushes him between her legs, and she forgets about any kind shame about her body hair or her smell or the weight around her belly when his tongue licks slowly up her clit. 

 

When he makes her come, her fingers pulling his curls tight, his mouth sucking on her clit and his fingers inside her, Tana feels as warm as she can be, a warm pit of light in her belly. 

  
  
  
  


**DAY NINE**

 

She bathes with a loofah, and a bucket of warm water Gavriel brings her every day. It's not ideal, but it works. There's buckets too for her urine and other waste. Gavriel takes them away each day and comes back with clean ones. She hates the thought of Gavriel cleaning her literal shit— _ we've known each other a week, that is way too intimate _ —but he laughed and said something horrible about seeing the insides of people, including his own, many many times. 

 

Gradually, her self imposed prison becomes a little warmer, a little brighter. The picture of Pearl she drew hangs on the wall she sleeps against, propped up with scotch tape, so she sees it when she wakes up every morning. 

 

She informs her audience about her struggles with food, showing the camera the blue tint around her bite marks on her throat, the blue around the tips of her fingers. Telling them how she can hear rats in the walls, scuttling about. Explains how her limbs are getting stiff, like rigor is setting in.

 

Like she is already dead. She looks already like a corpse, no ruddiness in her cheeks. 

 

On the stream, a thousand questions pop up, buzzing up her phone, but she turns it off. She doesn't wanna look at any emails, doesn't want to see anyone's encouragement. Or people telling her she should just give in already. 

 

She shakes, reaching for the bottle of vodka. Gavriel warned her that getting drunk, lowering her inhibitions isn't necessarily a good idea, and she smiled all crookedly, said,  _ that's what you're here for, right _ ? 

 

He didn't smile back.

 

She drinks anyway. If she's lucky, she'll make it out of this as a lush but alive. Alcohol always hit her system hard, buzzing around her insides, overheating her and turning her all loose limbed. The vodka straight with nothing else to temper the flavor is rough but it does create some artificial warmth, if only for a little while.

 

The cold is everywhere now. Deep in her insides. She'd give anything to be warm. 

  
  
  
  


**DAY TEN**

 

It was her idea. She blames the alcohol, or the cold or the isolation, anything and everything driving her a little mad, maybe mad as Gavriel if she stays here long enough. She expected him to protest, but he kissed her lips and said he'll be back soon then. 

 

The first brass lock clicks, she gets up and rushes to the door as close as she can until the chain pulls tightly, and she's still nowhere near the door.

 

Not that she's thinking of escaping. 

 

When the door opens all the way, it's Gavriel’s back she sees first, lugging an old mattress down the cellar stairs. Aidan emerges from the door just after, carrying the other end, walking carefully down the stairs together. 

 

Tana takes an instinctive step back, letting them set up the mattress where she sleeps, tugging her nest of blankets on top. 

 

“We’d thought you'd like something better than the floor,” Aidan says, flashing his charming grin at her. 

 

Aidan looked... _ good.  _ Dressed in jeans and a red button up and a hoodie that reminded her how young they were. His hair was messy and artfully shaggy. His cheeks were even a little pink and she felt an overwhelming surge of envy and something else, a little deeper and darker. 

 

“I didn't think youd need help carrying that,” Tana says. 

 

Aidan shoots her a wide, fangy grin, the kind that's used to make her melt and go along with whatever awful idea he's come up with. It's almost familiar and just a little horrifying but Tana smiles back all the same. 

 

“Gavriel here says you missed me,” he says, sitting on the craggy mattress. Gavriel sits next to him, close enough so Tana wonders what they've been up to, away from her. He stares at her, eyeing her teeth with a funny kind of wonder. “Did you really miss me?”

 

He reminds her of a puppy dog. One that would be awful to hurt. On this side of the hunger, he's not even scary anymore. He's just Aidan. 

 

“Of course I missed you,” she says with a shaking, shuddering breath. 

 

The smile drops off his face. “How are you?” He asks, dropping his voice low. “I watch your streams every day, you know?” He turns to Gavriel. “Is that chain really necessary?”

 

“Yes,” he says. 

 

_ I'm fine,  _ she wants to say.  _ I'm fine. I'm holding up. I'm fine I'm fine I'm fine.  _

 

“I'm drunk,” she tells him. “I've almost attacked Gavriel twice. I'm so Cold I'm blue.” She laughs and there's a sharp edge to her voice. She feels a little like a madwoman, locked in an attic. “Food doesn't taste like anything anymore. I'm so hungry and  _ Cold _ .” At the last word, she finds herself slipping into his lap, moving towards him and wrapping her arms around him, her chain jangling. Without thinking she nuzzles into his neck, like she could find some kind of warmth there, but he's cool like stone. 

 

Aidan shivers against her, like she can spread her sickness to him. 

 

“Hey, um,” Aidan asks, glancing at Gavriel. Tana pauses, realizing what they must look like. She doesn't know how much Gavriel told Aidan. She's not even sure this is okay. 

 

Gavriel, as if on cue, slinks on over to her, slipping behind her like he belongs there, always has. He wraps his arms around her waist, strong and steady, and nuzzles her ear with his mouth. 

 

Aidan watches them both with interest, gaze flickering back and forth between them.

 

“I brought him here for you,” Gavriel says in her ear, though Aidan hears—they both shudder with the words. Tana tries not to lick his neck. “Whatever you'd like to do. Or us to do.”

 

Gavriel reaches out, stroking Aidan’s hair, before giving it a slight tug, making her ex-boyfriend moan. “Right, Aidan? Whatever she wants us to do.” He isn't asking. 

 

“Jesus,” Aidan says, his voice throaty, that familiar lust-filled tone, nodding eagerly. He hasn't changed, at least, not significantly. A few murders under his belt and bodies they had to discard but still silly, selfish Aidan, and she knew all his tells. 

 

“Is that okay?” she asks him, whispering the words into his skin, but she knows he'll agree. Aidan never turned down a dare. Aidan didn't like to tell people no. 

 

She glances up then, to find both of looking at her, still as the dead, waiting for her command. It was intoxicating, flooding her body with warmth. She feels herself grow wet and eager between her legs. Their red eyes glitter like rubies, like spilled blood, beautiful and terrible. Tana longs to fall into fall into them. To be weightless. To be nothing more than crushed little stars, scattered in the wind. 

 

She meets Gavriel’s eyes, make sure he's watching her, before she kisses Aidan. He makes a small gasp of surprise before following her lead, meeting her mouth eagerly. Her chest lurches, her belly swimming, aching between her legs. It's easy to grind down against him, his cock quickening against her. 

 

_ God,  _ she forgot how much she missed being with him. How badly she wanted to win his game. 

 

When she pulls away, she grabs his chin, tilts his head to her. Aidan stares at her with hazy, heavy lidded eyes, already lost. 

 

“Remember the last game we played?” she asks. “The boy between us?”

 

He nods. 

 

She digs her fingers in. Maybe a little too roughly, but he doesn't seem to mind. “Are you game?”

 

_ Don't run away this time.  _

 

Aidan smirks his vampire smile. “I'm game.”

 

Gavriel leans in closer. “Game?” he asks with notable interest, his head cocked, reminiscent of a wolf. 

 

There's a moment where Tana is afraid to answer, to explain everything that went on between her and Aidan—the dares and one-upmanship and  _ sex chicken _ , the adrenaline rush they both craved and sought together. 

But Aidan turns his smirk on Gavriel. “Tana and I,” he says, his grin wicked, “we used to get into all sorts of trouble together.”

 

She laughs into his skin. Gavriel smiles back, sharp and deadly, his wide mouth inviting. 

 

“Yes,” Gavriel purred. “I've done my fair share of hedonism. More than you can imagine.”

 

She wants to ask more about that, what awful hedonistic things he's done, how much blood did he consume, what did they  _ drink,  _ but Gavriel leans and kisses Aidan;Tana feels the breath go right out of her. 

 

He devours Aidan's mouth, his kiss long and deep, swallowing his moans. It's nothing like that boy on the couch long ago, far more intense than anything they’ve ever done. She watches them for a long while, transfixed by the sight—Gavriel cupping his face, pale skin and pink mouths moving against each other, Aidan reaching out to tangle his hand in his hair. Tana wonders if this is what it felt when Gavriel kissed her. 

 

Tana isn't thinking, running on instinct, chasing adrenaline and warmth. She runs her hand down to Aidan's cock, rubbing him through his jeans while he kisses Aidan, wanting to feel him react. 

 

“No biting,” Gavriel tells him, breaking off, tips of his fangs showing, and Aidan whines, low in his throat. It's not a human sound. 

 

Tana makes a low whining noise as well. She  _ wants  _ to see them bite. She remembers when Gavriel bit Aidan in the parking lot, how he swooned, how scared she'd been; the stolen moment she missed when Gavriel rolled up his sleeve and gave Aidan his blood. What a generous vampire he'd been, giving two Cold kids what they needed. 

 

“No one bites,” Gavriel said, like he can read her mind. “That's the rule.” To Aidan, he strokes the side of his face, a strange and intimate gesture. “I enjoy your mouth, but don't think I won't muzzle you.”

 

She nods, takes a breath.  _ Okay. Okay.  _

 

“Strip,” she tells them, easing back, pulling her hand away. Aidan hops to attention like he was made for taking orders, like she should have been bossing him around this whole time. He tugs his hoodie off, then his shirt in rapid succession. He starts to stand, but Gavriel holds him down. Then he shoves him back on the bed, quick and fast, catching both of them off guard. She is suddenly a little nervous, but Aidan's smiling, staring at Gavriel with an intense hunger, like he wants to eat him, too.

 

He doesn't ask Tana for permission—Gavriel just moves to remove Aidan of his pants, unbuttoning the top button, pulling down the zipper, meeting Aidan's eyes as he does so, like a dare. There's something horrible and erotic about watching Gavriel divest Aidan of his pants, like seeing a curious new side of him she didn't know existed—watching him tug Aidan's pants down faster than she can keep up, then hooking his fingers into his underwear. Tana stares at the way his cock juts out through his boxers, the sharp hip bones, the bare planes of his chest. Aidan's chest doesn't rise and fall like the way it used to, she notices, hyper aware of all the ways he is a dead boy now.

 

They both look at her, two dead boys with blood red eyes, waiting for orders. Tana allows herself a giggle, flushed with desire and power. She barely knows what she's going to ask for until it leaves her mouth. 

 

“Your shirt too,” she demands. Gavriel laughs, ducks his head, and starts slowly undoing his buttons, showing off every little strip of skin, going far too slow for the urgency he’s shown. He is putting on a show for her, and she laughs, giddy with excitement. Aidan stares too, resting on his elbows, licking his lips. She images both of them kissing Gavriel's chest, making their way down his body. She wants to grab his jeans and pull them off herself, wondering if his cock is as beautiful as his face.

 

Gavriel tosses the shirt to the ground when he's done. Tana keeps staring at his pink nipples, how they contrast against his pale skin, wondering if they are like that even if he hasn't fed.

 

She runs her tongue across her fangs. She can't think. She can't word her thoughts. She is a mass of hunger and lust and desire, in the shape of a girl.

 

She shakes, wrapping her arms around her, cold threading her insides. 

 

“So what shall I do with your boy here?” Gavriel asks, bringing her out of her daze. He runs a hand down Aidan's chest, in between his pecs, then down his sternum, then over his belly that still looked soft despite everything. Aidan's eyes flutter shut, leaning into the touch. She's not sure she's ever seen him like this. She wonders if she should be jealous. 

 

“Shall I relieve him of his virginity?” He asks, pulling down Aidan’s boxes at last. Aidan’s cock twitches with excitement, the head red, curving up towards his belly. 

 

“He's not a virgin,” Tana says faintly. 

 

“I'm, um,” Aidan whispers, awkward for once. “I'm a backdoor virgin.”

 

“Oh,” she says. 

 

“I could bring you close,” he tells Aidan, hand just ghosting his cock, Aidan’s eyes rolling back, biting off a groan. “Bring you to the edge of and pull back before you taste sweet release.” Giving him nasty grin as he pulls his hand away. “I can be quite merciless.”

 

“Yeah,” Aidan said, nodding. “Yeah,  _ please _ .”

 

“It's up to Tana,” Gavriel says, reminding her of some kind of playful, mischief god; a myth he told her once, keeping her distracted; she can’t remember now. 

 

Aidan looked back, his expression pleading, puppy dog eyes that somehow still worked even when they were red. 

 

Aidan doesn't like telling people no but she never liked telling him no either. 

 

“Can you—” she starts, fighting with herself, trying to focus. She is gasping, breathing heavy, sucking breaths.  “Can you suck him? Is that—is that a thing?” 

 

She feels so stupidly young suddenly, painfully inexperienced up against whatever Gavriel must have done. He chuckles, reaching for Aidan’s cock, rubbing the leaking head. 

 

“That is a  _ thing, _ ” he says as Aidan bucks into his hand, panting for breath he doesn't need like a force of habit. 

 

“Just,” she fumbles. “Don't do it for me, I don't wanna make you—”

 

“Tana,” Gavriel cuts her off. “I've done this before,” he says. “I've been intimate with men before.”

 

“I fucking knew it,” Aidan says, but Gavriel turns his gaze on him and he shudders with lust, with hunger. She wonders if Aidan misses the taste of Gavriel’s blood as much as she does. 

 

“It's been over ten years,” Gavriel says, sliding down his body, lowering his head. “But I still know how it goes,” he says, and sucks the head of Aidan’s cock into his mouth, wet, obscene sucking sounds filling the room. 

 

Aidan cries out, a full body shudder going through him, and Gavriel grabs him, holding his hips down firmly, fingers digging into his skin, then swallows him to the root. 

 

Tana feels like she can't breathe. She wants to—move.  _ Do something.  _ But she's forgotten how her limbs work and she stares, transfixed by the sight—Gavriel’s wide mouth around Aidan’s cock, swallowing him, bobbing his head in a careful, slow rhythm. 

 

She makes a low mewling sound, spreading her legs, knees spread apart. She slides a hand into her raggedy pants, into her underwear, fingers finding her slick cunt, brushing up against her clitoris—the one warm spot in her body, moaning along with Aidan. 

 

She bites her own cheek in her desire, clean through, the metallic taste coating her tongue. They can smell it. They must. 

 

Aidan looks behind him, to where she's kneeling on the bare mattress and despite herself, she has a moment of shame of him catching her like this, hands in her underwear and making herself bleed. Aidan’s eyes have a glazed over look, gazing at her. 

 

“Tana,” he entreats to her, reaching out with a hand. “C’mere _.” _

 

She doesn't think about it. She crawls up to him and grabs his arms, holding them above his head. Aidan puts up a mock a struggle, but there's a smile on his lips when she leans down to kiss him. 

 

When he tastes her blood, he groans deeply, arches his body into her, into Gavriel. She feels his fangs against her tongue and she thinks about letting him take more, playing with fire until she burns. Tana lets go of his arms to feel his chest—runs his hands over his chest, his nipples, digs her nails into his skin. 

 

He came, she realizes, Gavriel pulling off his cock in the corner of her eye, but she doesn't pay attention to that. She breaks the kiss to lick a stripe down his chest and drives her teeth straight in, above the nipple. 

 

The blood explodes, spraying on the bed, on her face, in her mouth. The warmth in her belly turns into her fire, and it didn't matter that Aidan’s blood was stolen, it burned down her throat, driving away the Cold, the stiffness, the hunger and ache between her legs. He doesn't even fight her. 

 

Gavriel tears them apart, hands wrapping around her waist and pulling her away. 

 

Tana screams. 

 

Aidan holds a hand to his chest. Gavriel tells Aidan to leave and Tana kicks and claws at them both, and screams and screams and screams. 

  
  
  
  


**DAY ONE**

 

“I have to start over again,” she tells her audience. Explains why drinking vampire blood resets the whole clock. 

 

“I...” she starts.  _ Had an accident. Made a mistake.  _ “I bit into my ex-boyfriend’s chest.”

 

Tana doesn't think she manipulated anyone. She didn't trick Gavriel into letting Aidan down into her cellar, just so she could bite him—his blood was weaker, not as strong as Gavriel's blood, but offering less resistance—she just asked Gavriel to bring him down for some relief, the way Gavriel's mouth on her provided some relief. 

 

But it sure feels that way. 

 

“Don't worry. He's still alive. He's a vampire.” There's something absurd about that statement now. 

 

She can feel fangs in her mouth, sharper than knives. They're longer now. Her heart still beats, which reminds her she's still alive. That she's not actually a vampire yet. 

 

She's still Cold, but alive. Still human. 

 

Sometimes she wonders. Sometimes she's not sure. How can anyone still human have such sharp teeth. 

 

Eighty-eight days, restarting again. 

  
  
  
  


**DAY TWO**

 

“Are you going to muzzle me?” she asks. 

 

She's sleeping with her back to him. She doesn't want to look at him. Something like shame curls up in her belly and lays there, heavy as a stone. 

 

She thinks of the Cold kids in Lucien’s mansion, their eyes hazy, unseeing, like dangerous drug addicts, their mouths clamped shut with a metal muzzle. 

 

She shivers. The effect of Aidan’s blood is already fading. 

 

“Do you want me to?” he asks, his hand stroking her hair, too gentle for some who just ruined her progress, more than she deserves. 

 

She knows the right answer, the shame in her guts tell her. She knows what needs to be done. 

 

“No,” she says. 

 

“Then I won't.”

 

For the first time, she wishes Gavriel would leave her alone to her torment. 

  
  
  
  
  


**DAY THREE**

 

She breaks her chains while Gavriel is out. 

 

She didn't think it would work, but it did, tugged lose, ripped off the pipe. Maybe it was the extra blood, Aidan giving her the strength to do it 

 

The chain remains attached to her wrist, but she can move further than the several feet it allowed her. She can move to stand by the door. 

 

The thought terrifies her because she knows what she should do—be a good girl and stay down here. Don't break her streak again. 

 

She glances at the drawing of Pearl she drew, hanging up on the the wall. Knows she has to be watching her, whenever she streams an update. 

 

_ Do it for Pearl,  _ she tells herself.  _ If not for you.  _

 

When Gavriel unlocks the last brass lock on her door, when it swings open, she dives for him. 

 

Gavriel falls to the floor, letting out an almost human  _ oof  _ as he hit the floor, the food he brought spilling on the ground, cans clanking. 

 

Tana steps over him, runs up the stairs, steps right over the threshold and for the first time in weeks, sees the kitchen of the Victorian house she's holed in, sees something more than the one flickering lightbulb of her cellar. 

 

She can almost taste the outside. Smell the fresh air. Hear human heartbeats just down the street. Nothing has ever seen so inviting. 

 

Then Gavriel grabs her ankle and pulls. 

 

Tana falls. 

 

She doesn't know what hurts more—the fall or the hunger that claws at her. Her head throbs. The room is spins in circles. 

 

Gavriel is pulling her down the stairs, like some monster dragging her down the basement, tugging her by her chain like a leash. Tana turns around and kicks him right in his beautiful face. 

 

His nose cracks with blood and she is going to get up and run, but her legs can't decide where to go—out to freedom and away from the cold, or towards Gavriel’s sweet, powerful blood. 

 

The hesitation costs her everything. 

 

He lunges for her, mouth twisted in a snarl. 

 

Instead of running, she lunges back at him, snapping her jaws, diving with her fangs, thinking she's already restarted, what's another two days. Her fangs graze skin, but Gavriel is too fast, spinning her around and locking his arms around her, locking her arms in, pressing her back tightly against his chest. 

 

“No,” she whispers, flailing her legs, kicking at nothing. Then can't stop saying it, gradually increasing in tone, until she's shouting it at the top of her lungs,  _ no No No NO NO NO.  _

 

“I'm sorry, Tana,” he says in a low voice, brutal but gentle, “but I'm going to have to be cruel to you now.”

 

Then he presses an arm against her throat, against her windpipe, tightly, until Tana can't speak, until she can't breath. 

 

Then black. 

  
  
  
  


When she wakes up, she is groggy, her head is full of fog and cotton, the hunger throbbing in her belly, a cold sweat running down her temples. The steel chain is around her ankle now, reinforced. It looks different. Newer. Tana wonders how long she's been out. 

 

Gavriel is staring at her, sitting cross legged. He is sitting out of reach of her chain. 

 

That hurts. 

 

Her throat is sore. She runs her neck and can feel bruises there, blooming anew. Next to her is a gallon of water that she reaches for. It soothes the rawness of her throat, but water perversely makes her thirst worse. 

 

She opens her mouth to say an apology and realizes she's not sorry, not even at all. She's staring at her ankle chain and wondering if she can break this one.

 

“You're stronger than I thought,” Gavriel says. His nose is no longer broken but he's pale, eyes sunken in. When did he last feed, she wonders. 

 

What did she do to him?

 

“I'm sorry,” she manages. Her voice sounds different. Hoarse. Guttural. “For kicking you.” 

 

Her eyes sting with a blurry wetness. She wipes them with the back of her hand. “I think I might turn against you?”

 

“It's alright, Tana,” he says. He's close now,  moved faster than she can see, when her eyes swam with tears. He takes her face in her hands and it's only how tired she is that she doesn't try to bite him again. 

 

“We all go a little mad, when we're in pain. When we're in agony. When we're starving.”

 

She chokes on a sob. “I don't want to  _ fight you,”  _ she says, and even she doesn't know if that's true anymore. “I was just—”

 

“Any caged animal longs to be free.” 

 

_ I'm not an animal _ , she starts to say, but she can't push the words out when she doesn't believe them.

 

“Believe me, Tana,” he says, cupping her face in his hands. “If it were up to me, I would have eased your suffering by now.”

 

The words stop her cold. It takes a moment for her to process them, but even her hunger-addled mind can see what he means. 

 

“Why don't you?” she asks. Her voice shakes. She bites her tongue, because if she says anything more, she's going to start begging. 

 

_ Please, Gavriel, I don't want to be Cold anymore.  _

 

“Because I fear you will never forgive me,” he says, “if I am the one to steal your humanity from you. I don't think I could live with that. That's my weakness.”

 

She nods, pulling away from him. She lies on the soiled mattress, looking up at the swinging light fixture and laughs. 

  
  


**DAY FOUR**

 

One of the rats living in the walls comes out finally, when the lights go off, its little noises waking Tana up. 

 

She stares at it for a long time, scuttling around. When it comes near her, she snatches it. 

 

When Gavriel comes back, he finds her with her fangs in the little creature’s stomach, ripping and tearing to get at whatever little blood it has. Something about biting into a living thing, a struggling creature, makes her insides light up. 

 

He starts bringing her rats after that. Tana is too hungry to even feel humiliated. 

  
  
  
  


**DAY FIVE**

 

_ Did Lucian and Elisabet mean a lot to you? _

 

Tana is half awake and half asleep, floating out into nothing, barely alive. Her mind swims with hunger. It’s difficult to hold on to time, to ground herself in reality, in the cold dirt below her mattress. Gavriel lies next to her, tucked in with her for the day. He smells like fabric softener and gore, the fresh scent of blood clinging to him no matter how much he tried to wash it off. 

 

Tana finds herself drifting to the vampires that brought them both here. Elisabet, who murdered most of her friends. Lucian, who she killed. Both of them Gavriel's companions, a long time ago. 

 

_ Yes. Once upon a time. It's an ugly fairy tale.  _

 

She shudders with the image of them—three vampires with the whole world at their feet, before the world ended. 

 

_ You must have thought you'd be together forever.  _

 

_ Yes.  _

  
  
  
  


**DAY SIX**

 

“It's amazing how meaningless things can become,” she tells her audience. 

 

Her magazines, her manga. Her markers, her drawings. 

 

She glances at the camera. Looks her audience in the eye. 

 

“I know I promised you all I'll keep this going, but I don't think I can do it much longer.”

 

“And it's not because I don't want to. It's because I'm starting to forget there's anything else but this.”

 

She chuckles, laughs until she sobs. 

 

“ _ I'm just so hungry.” _

  
  
  
  
  


**DAY EIGHT**

 

There are footsteps outside her door, pacing back and forth. It's not Gavriel. 

 

“Hello?” she calls out. The footsteps stop moving, but they don't come closer. 

 

“Hello!”

 

No answer. 

 

When she first started this, she was afraid of how vulnerable she was, how she defenseless she'd be if anyone were to try to come down and take advantage. 

 

Now she hopes whoever is out there is human. She hopes they open the door. She hopes they come closer. 

 

_ My, what big teeth you have, grandma.  _

 

“Please, can you help me? I'm trapped.”

 

_ The better to eat you with, my dear.  _

 

Still no response. She can't hear anything from the person behind the door. She makes a noise like a whimper. Maybe it's not a human.

 

“Aidan, are you there?” she asks on a whim. 

 

She can feel something, a presence. Or maybe its just her mind, going insane, losing it as the room spins.

 

Maybe she is cracked. Maybe she is crazy as Gavriel now. 

 

“Aidan,” she calls out, as if she could will him to appear at her door. “Aidan? Aidan Aidan Aidan Aidan—”

 

“I’m here, Tana,” he says from the other side of the door. 

 

Thirty brass locks. The room sways. She can see her mother in the basement, her beautiful black hair ragged, her skin dry and patchy, and so so Cold. 

 

“Let me out,” she cries out. “Please. I don't want to do this anymore.”

 

Aidan doesn't answer.

 

“Aidan,” she tries again. “Didn't you  _ want  _ me to be a vampire? You kept trying to get us to both to drink human blood. You don't want me to  _ ever  _ leave Coldtown.”

 

“But now I'm actually a vampire—”

 

“Oh, like you're not loving it,” she scoffs, letting cruelty creep into her voice. “I bet you're famous. One half of the farmhouse massacre survivors? I bet girls are  _ crawling  _ all over you.”

 

“I haven't slept with a girl since I turned,” Aidan says flatly. “All the vampire girls scare me and all the human ones I wanna kill.”

 

She laughs, a real one. She can hear Aidan sit down, slide down against the door, his back to it. Considering it. 

 

“Let me out,” she whines. “You can bring me human blood. We can both be vampires, just like you wanted, right, Aidan? We can feed on all the beautiful girls and hot guys you want.”

 

She is rambling like a crazy person. She can't stop herself. Everything feels so far away. 

 

“Tana,” Aidan says, slowly, carefully. “This isn't like you.”

 

“Maybe you don't know me as well as you think you do,” she growls. “I thought you didn't want me to be a buzzkill? This is me not being a buzzkill.”

 

No response. 

 

“Please,” she begs. “Please, I'm just so hungry, it  _ hurts  _ all the time, I can't think about anything else but blood. Please, I'm so tired. I can't sleep. I'm eating rats, Aidan. Aidan!”

 

Silence. Then— 

 

“What about Pearl?” he asks.

 

She bangs her hand against the wooden wall. Something cracks in her hand, but she can barely feel the pain. 

 

“Don't you dare,” she hisses. “Don't you dare talk about Pearl.”

 

“I love Pearl too, you know—”

 

“Aidan!” she screams. She didn't want to think about the little sister she may never see again right now. “Let me out!” 

 

No response. 

 

“C'mon,” she says, “you always did like to be bullied. Let me out.”

 

This is awful of her. She knows it even as she speaks .  She is turning into a monster, in slow motion, like a trainwreck, following in her mother's footsteps.

 

But she can't stop herself. It’s like she is standing outside of herself, watching her self turn pathetic and beg and cry for her freedom, but  _ not  _ at the same time, not outside of herself, perfectly within herself, staring out from behind her eyes. She begs and pleads until she’s sobbing from behind the doors and she can hear it, the soft tones in the room just behind this door, that Aidan was crying too.

 

Then he gets up, walking away. 

 

“Aidan, don't leave,” she cries out, desperation clawing at her throat. 

 

Footsteps walking away, growing quieter.

 

“Aidan, don't leave me!”

 

Tana starts screaming. 

  
  
  
  
  


**DAY NINE**

 

She screams at the door. She screams so loud it turns into a sob. She screams like a human girl, sobbing and desperate and so so hungry. She screams like a feral beast, a banshee wail. It echoes across the walls. It goes on forever and ever. 

 

She pounds on the walls until her fists bleed raw, then licks her own blood off her knuckles. 

 

Gavriel grabs her, wraps his strong arms around her to keep her from hurting herself. 

 

“Go ahead and scream yourself hoarse,” he says, voice cold, tugging a strand of hair off her face. His mouth is hot against her ear, a stolen warmth, fresh blood on his breath. “It’s a sweet sound. I'm not letting you out.”

  
  
  
  
  


**DAY SEVENTEEN**

 

Tana lies on the floor, shaking and shivering, her voice gone. She finds her mind drifting to all the vampire hunters who've gone Cold, who sweated out the infection, only to go Cold again, bitten again, infected again, until the infection takes eventually. 

 

The scar on her throat where Midnight bit her aches. The one where she let Gavriel feed from throbs. Her mother’s teeth marks burns. She runs her fingers over the scar her mother left, and shivers. 

 

_ Tana, get the key. Get the key. Tana. Tana.  _

 

It feels like she's here. Right up close, pressing out from under her skin. A savage and hungry monster, desperate for blood. 

 

The angle is bad, but she does it anyway, holds the crook of the elbow to her mouth and bites down on the scar, where her mom tore open her skin and nearly killed her. 

 

( _ Did you like it? I bet you liked it. Don't lie, you totally did) _

 

Her fangs puncture the skin easy and she thinks,  _ look Mom look, look what I did for you. _

 

_ You can have my blood if you want, mommy. Just don't die.  _

 

In her little kid dream, blood tastes like strawberry sherbet, like fizzy soda, bubbling up inside her, giving her a brain freeze. Here, it tastes like copper and salt and Cold. 

 

In her little kid dream, being vampire mother and child was all white dresses and fairytale endings, living in the woods like good little vampires. 

 

_ Her mother with her coal black hair and her ruby red lips smiles at her. In the dark of the cellar, she's pale and her red eyes gleam.  _

 

“Mom?” she rasps. “Mommy?”

 

_ In her big girl dreams, they rip out a man's throat together, because there is no such thing as a good vampire, and the red is all over her face and on her mother’s lips when she kisses her forehead.   _

 

No answer. Her mom is gone. 

 

Tana’s sobs are ragged, brittle things. 

 

The camera is running, broadcasting to the world. She can't bear to turn it off. Can't get up off the floor and shut it. Can't talk to anyone today. 

 

The hum of its electricity buzzes loud in her ears. 

  
  
  
  
  


**DAY: UNKNOWN**

 

She dreams of the party, all her dead classmates; she licks their blood off the walls, crawls over their bodies and sucks on old, dead blood, the carpet  _ squelch squelch  _ beneath her feet. 

 

In this one she is already Cold, just like Aidan and she finds him and they devour each other. 

 

She is so hungry she can't think of anything else just blood blood blood red red down her chin down her body under her skin blood everywhere on the walls blood is everything it's all over under her thin thin skin and bones and she is going to burst, explode, her skin too tight and too constraining and all she wants to do is feed.

 

Gavriel comes running when he sees the feed, bringing medical supplies he's not entirely sure how to use. He turns off the camera. 

 

Tana tore a hole in her wrist, gnawing on her arm like a coyote.

 

_ I'm just  _

 

_ so _

 

_ hungry. _

  
  
  
  
  


**DAY: UNKNOWN**

 

He stitches her up, cleans the wound, makes sure it doesn't go septic, make her rot from the inside out. Her blood is all over his hands. She lets out a manic laugh. 

 

“You can have some _,_ ” she whispers to him, pushing her wrist into his face. “It's okay. I want you to.”

 

Gavriel shudders, the hunger in his eyes, even when he was pink from feeding earlier. She wonders if they ever actually stop being hungry. 

 

But he takes her up on her offer, bending his head down, not over her wrist that he just disinfected, but the rivulets of blood that went down over her forearms, lapping up until all that was left is a stain, kneeling in front of her, head bowed, like taking communion. 

 

Tana shudders, full body, almost hard enough to hurt. She thinks about splitting his face open. Wonders how far blood would splatter all over this room if she tore out a jugular. 

 

She's too tired and weak for that now, simply stares at Gavriel with glassy eyes and whines low in her throat. 

 

“I’m sorry,” he tells her, when he's done, clasping his hands around her wrist, putting the bandage on. Stopping the blood flow.  _ Sorry for what,  _ she wonders. For drinking when she asked? For not letting her feed? 

 

That's what she asked for, right?

 

It seems like forever ago.

 

“When I was a kid,” she says, startled by the sound of her voice, low and ragged, like someone took her vocal cords and ran sandpaper over it. “I used to dream I went Cold first. My mom, she'd give me human blood, then beg me to bite her.”

 

“A nightmare?” he asks. 

 

His mouth is painted red and she wants to kiss him, the blood making her excited, weak as she was. She hasn't felt arousal in a while—Gavriel can't get her off to distract her anymore, the hunger consuming all the feelings in her body—but even her own blood on his lips spikes something in her dying body.

 

“No,” she confesses. “A happily ever after. She never died. We ran off and put on white flowy nightgowns like in old Gothic movies, and lived in the woods. We were together forever.” She laughs. “That's silly, isn't it? Becoming a monster as happily ever after.” She pauses. 

 

“No offense.”

 

He arches his brows, knitted in concern, before laughing. “Tana, I know I'm a monster. You can't offend me by speaking the truth. I am only sorry I've done a terrible job of wooing you.”

 

She laughs, but it sounds awful coming from her. Low and hollow. “I mean, what kind of boyfriend doesn't bring his girl tasty mice to eat? I'll take that over your riches, Mr. Spider.”

 

He smirks. His teeth are red with her blood. 

 

Tana closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, then another. Trying to grab on to her thoughts, what she wants to say, before the hunger overwhelms her again.

 

“What I'm saying,” she starts, “is maybe I already went Cold, back when I was ten. And I just took the long way around to being a monster.”

 

“You're not a monster. You're merely hungry,” he says as he wraps a bandage around her wrist. All Tana hears is the word _yet_ , silent at the end of his sentences. “With some vampires, there's almost something innocent in their hunger...no malice, no sadism, no hatred. Just the need to feed.” 

 

Tana thinks of Midnight, and the angry hateful way she attacked her. She got all the malice. 

 

“When the Donner party starved,” Gavriel goes on, “they ate their own family members. It was necessity. They were human.”

 

Tana shudders, thinking of Pearl, how sweet her blood had smelled, and a mother shaped monster ripping her flesh apart in the basement. 

 

He kisses her. It's gentle, firm press of closed lips, chaste, not like their first kiss. Like a man at his dying wife's bedside, except her father would never touch her mom while Cold. 

 

Tana purrs into the kiss, when the flavor of him hits her mouth.    
  
“You taste like fresh blood,” she says with a laugh bubbling in her chest. “You should brush your teeth. It's not fair to tease a girl like that.”

  
  


  
  


 

**DAY: UNKNOWN**

 

Today's meal is a can of fruit cocktail. Tana gets a few bites in before she starts throwing up.

 

Gavriel brings her a squirrel—a live one, that he lets loose in her cellar, scurrying away from them in fear. He knows she likes to catch them with her bare hands. 

 

The thing about animal blood, is that it tastes disgusting but it's about the only thing she can stomach.

 

“How long did it take for you to lose your mind?” she asks, the squirrel blood crusting on her lips.

 

“I lost track,” he says. 

 

He isn't looking at her.

 

So has she. 

  
  
  
  


**DAY: UNKNOWN**

 

Tana turns the camera on. It's the first time she's turned it on since Gavriel shut it off. She forgot about it. Her phone is long dead. Checking texts, emails, messages—it all seems pointless.

 

She stares at the camera without saying a word, sitting cross legged on the floor. First for a minute, then two, then she loses track of time. Just staring. 

 

The light blinks at her. Recording. 

 

She wonders what she looks like to the audience. Some kind of horror. Some kind of living corpse. She's pale with sickness and Cold and malnutrition. Blue around her extremities. Thinner than she was at the start, from not eating enough. Her hair, a ragged birds nest, despite Gavriel trying to keep it combed. Bits have started to fall out. Animal blood still caked on her mouth. 

 

“I’m going to tell you a secret,” she says; she leans in, conspiratorially, imagining the audience on the other end pulling up their chairs. 

 

“There is no way to sweat out the infection without going insane,” she says. “All those hunters who managed to sweat out the infection, the rich people who paid through the nose to cleanse themselves? All of them have gone mad.”

 

Including her.    
  


“Because once you daydream and fantasize and obsess and think think think about nothing but blood, it's already too late for you.” 

  
She laughs and laughs and her voice is hollow low rumble.    
  


She looks up at the ceiling. The swinging flickering light. It hurts her eyes but she can't reach the light switch to shut it off. 

 

She takes three long deep breathes, finding her train of thought. 

 

Back to the camera. 

 

“So your options are becoming a monster, or going insane. Or both. Or you can kill yourself. There's always that.”

 

“If I were a better person, I would have done that.” Like Gavriel’s sister, who murdered a man and then stepped out in the daylight. Took herself out before she could take anyone else out. 

 

Tana isn't going to take herself out. 

 

She shows the audience her bandaged wrist. 

 

“I wasn't trying to kill myself,” she explains. “I just wanted to drink some blood.”

 

She stands up and grabs a dead squirrel, already stiff, one Gavriel hasn't removed from her sight yet. 

 

“Gavriel brings me these little guys to soothe the cravings. It helps, a little. It's why I can even talk to you. Isn't my boyfriend the best, you guys?” 

 

She grins at the camera, displaying her fangs. They are not cute anymore. It must look horrible. It hurts to stretch her mouth that wide, like her skin is pulled too tightly on her. 

 

“It's never not you,” she explains. Her smile drops. “Everyone who tells you that a vampire isn't the same person anymore. That they're demons. That when you're hungry, you're not yourself _—you're not you when you're hungry, grab a snickers—_ that's just something people believe so they sleep better at night.”

 

“Truth is, it's always you. When you're starving. When you're daydreaming about drinking your little sister’s blood. When you're ripping the flesh from your daughter. When you are tearing into your ex-boyfriend's chest, or when you kill your twin brother.”

 

The bite on her throat throbs with aching cold, her weak pulse springing to life at the memory of Midnight’s teeth, how it felt to be nearly drained, the pulling tugging weak swooning sensation. 

  
Tana moans, eyes fluttering. She places her hands to her temples, rubbing her head, but it doesn't help. She's losing it. She won't be able to talk soon. “Your best self. Your worst self. Your  _ coolest  _ self,” she chuckles, remembering how badly she wanted to outcool Aidan, a lifetime ago. “You're truest _ self.” _

 

_ “ _ If you learn anything from these streams, I hope it's that. The hunger _ , _ ” she rasps out, “ _ hurts.  _ It's everywhere. Not at first. But it spreads. Fast. Claws at your skin. Claws at your stomach. Claws at your insides.”

 

She shivers. “Everything hurts when you're Cold. It stills hurts but it's a part of me now.”

 

“See, I'm not a girl. I'm not a vampire. I'm just...

 

Hunger.”

 

_ Maybe,  _ Tana thinks,  _ becoming a monster is just growing up.  _

 

_ Maybe we all become monsters when we grow up.  _

  
  
  
  
  


**DAY: UNKNOWN**

 

When the door unlocks, she expects Gavriel but his steps sound different. Tana huddles under her blankets, pulling them up over herself, hiding her body, her wrists, her ankle chain.

 

“Hey, hey,” Aidan says, his voice cheery. “Did you miss me?”

 

She doesn't answer him. 

 

“I guess that's a no.” He makes a  _ tsk _ noise. “I missed you, you know. Gavriel won't let me back in since last time. He says we have a weird effect on each other.”

 

Tana stays silent.  _ Come closer.  _

 

He does. He walks closer to her, steps coming close but not quite close enough. 

 

“I can't believe you're a rat sucker,” he jokes, trying to get a rise out of her. When she doesn't answer, he lowers his voice. 

 

“Are you awake, Tana? I saw your stream.”

 

She shivers, pulls the blankets tighter. 

 

“Tana,” he says, voice tight with concern and he comes closer, closer,  _ closer,  _ until he's kneeling down beside her, stroking her hair, whispering soft soothing things and— 

 

Tana lunges. 

 

For a vampire, Aidan doesn't even see it coming. He goes down hard on the ground. He drops something, clattering on the ground but Tana doesn't care. There's a flash of teeth, fangs, and red eyes, hands struggling against her, and she sinks her teeth in the yielding flesh of Aidan’s throat. 

 

Aidan tasted like warm summer nights and hot copper kisses—his blood was thick, like clover, like honey, heavy on her tongue, spurting across her mouth and chin. It didn't matter Aidan was a dead boy, he brought her back to life, made her heart pump and throb, drove the Cold away. 

 

He pulls her back by her hair, tugging hard enough to rip her teeth out of his throat, to  _ hurt.  _ She cries out and then actually cries when she stares down on him, her voice turning into sobs. 

 

She made a  _ ruin _ of his throat. She'd nearly ripped it out. Blood was everywhere, on his clothes and the mattress and the blankets and his face. His eyes are wide with what she thinks is horror, mouth hanging open. 

 

“I'm sorry,” she says, panting, knowing she's ruined her progress  _ yet again _ , all his dumb fault for feeling sorry for her and still, she was sorry. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Aidan, I'm a freak of nature, I'm some kind of living,  _ cannibal _ vampire, I'm—”

 

“Tana,” he interrupts her, grabbing her bloody face in his hands. “I brought something for you.”

 

He tilts his head to the side, where what he dropped rolled away. A thermos, it's contents spilling out, dark red and seeping into the dirt floor. 

 

“I know you'll probably be really mad at me for this,” Aidan says “But I'm just not strong enough to keep watching you suffer. You  _ really _ don't look so good. Like a zombie.”

 

“We’re all guilty of the sin of mercy,” she says, as she realizes what he brought her. 

 

“Christ, you sound like Gavriel.”

 

Hot, pulse warm blood scent floods her senses. 

 

Tana scrambles off Aidan, scuttling across the floor like an animal. She picks up the thermos; there's still some left, if she tilts it and lets it drip down her throat. Still some on the edges, on the lid. 

 

She stares at it, breathing heavy. Trying to think.  _ She didn't want this, right? _ Some part of her doesn't want this. Some small part encroached out by throbbing hunger. 

 

Aidan is babbling in the distance, but she doesn't hear anymore. His words don't register, drowned out as the smell of fresh human blood hits her nostrils. 

 

Why did she wanna fight this? It seems important to remember but she can't. She's staring down another eighty-eight days, reset. 

 

“Either way,” Aidan says. “You can blame me for everything when this is all over.”

 

Another eighty-eight days of madness, of tearing herself apart. 

 

Tana licks the rim of the Thermos, licking the blood off like it's leftover cake batter. The moment it hits her tongue,  _ something  _ changes _.  _ It tastes hot and pulsing and alive, didn't matter that it was in a thermos. She wants more, she wants the pulse of someone's throat and the warm arterial spray coating her tongue, wants the warmth all over her body. She tilts the thermos back, waiting for the last bits of blood to trickle down her throat. She makes a low shuddering cry, almost sobbing in relief. 

 

Sometimes there are no good choices. 

 

When she's gotten all she can, she raises her head to look at Aidan. She feels something like clarity for the first time in ages, her head clearing, the hunger abating for once. 

 

“I didn't leave you,” he whispers. 

 

Tana nods and crawls over to him. The wound on his throat doesn't look so bad now—her teeth marks still there but slowly stitching itself back up. She reaches out to him, stroking his face. He is pale and wan after what she did to him. 

 

She remembers when she was sad, mournful, at what Aidan had become. The boy she'd known, the boy she used to love, turned into a creature. It feels so long ago, barely able to remember the feelings of that girl before all of this. She doesn't even care now. Maybe later she will, but all she is relieved. 

 

She runs her fingernails down his cheek. “Remember when we met?” she whispers as a memory pops in her head.

 

He nods, lips twitching into a smile, despite what she's done to him. “Art class.”

 

She chuckles. “You made a model of yourself. You're such a dick.” She paused, cocking her head. “Feels like forever ago.”

 

“Not really that long,” Aidan says, but Tana doesn't know what day it is anymore. If it's even still summer. 

 

She looks at him, really looks at him. The teeth beneath his sweet smile. He was always a little wicked. “We'll never be those kids again, huh?”

 

Aidan laughs. “We’re gonna be kids forever, Tana,” he says. 

 

Well, that's one way of looking at it. 

 

She wonders where Gavriel is, if he'll be back soon but she can feel her heart slowing in her chest. 

 

“Will it hurt?” she asks him. Her voice shakes. 

 

Aidan takes a while to answer, which tells her all she needs to know. 

 

“You can just go to sleep,” he says. “It's alright. I'm not letting you die alone.”

 

She nods and curls up against him, laying her head on his chest. He wraps his arms around her, as she tucks herself into him and for a minute, it feels like being back home, making out in his room, stupid teenagers again. 

 

It's easy to close her eyes. 

 

Tana stops breathing. She never takes another breath again 

  
  
  
  
  


**DAY ONE**

 

Tana wakes up to the smell of blood, and low, wet sucking noises. 

 

She's on the mattress, staring up at the ceiling. The light is off. The darkness feels warm and comforting. 

 

The room smelled heavy, so many scents, old laundry and rotting corpse and warm earth and old bleach and gore and woodsy pine and sharp, sweet blood. 

 

Hunger claws at her throat. 

 

She sits up. Where she tackled Aidan to the ground, Gavriel kneels over Aidan, cradling him like a child, his hand on the back of his head. Aidan was feeding from his wrist, eyes shut and moaning, a look of ecstatic rapture on his face. 

 

Something tugs at her belly, hot like jealousy, but it went deeper than that.

 

“That's my boyfriend,” she says, faint, the smell of blood was making her dizzy, her body swaying. 

 

Her teeth feel so much larger now in her mouth. 

 

Gavriel glances up. His scarlet eyes look hazy, almost drunk, lip bitten red, his sable hair messy. When he notices her watching, he nudges Aidan, pushing him away. Aidan makes a whining noise, high in his throat, a not human noise, but he pulls away, mouth hanging open and blood down his chin, staining his tongue and bared fangs. 

 

“Thank—” he starts before he catches Tana’s eyes, and a wide, wicked smile bursts out over his lips, like all his birthdays came at once. 

 

There was something debauched about them both, like she caught them doing something sordid.  _ It's my fault,  _ she thinks,  _ I drank too much from Aidan and Gavriel had to heal him,  _ but she still feels left out. 

 

And hungry. 

 

God, so hungry, she thought it'd be  _ over  _ by now, but she can still feel it churning and gnawing at her insides, only now Aidan and Gavriel no longer seemed like good enough substitutes. 

 

Tana cocks her head at them. He looks different, sharper to her eyes. She could pick out fine strands of hair and all the details of his clothes, like 4K vision. She could see them like there were spotlights on them, lighting them up, clearer than anything else in the world. 

 

“You look different,” she says, her nose twitching. “You  _ smell  _ different.”

 

“Tana,” Gavriel says, taking a step towards her. She keeps staring at his bleeding wrist. At Aidan’s bloody smile. She wants to kiss them both. The part of her that used to shout  _ I'm not like that  _ is silent. 

 

She rips her gaze away from them, turning around, going back to her mattresses pressed against the wall. She crouches down, until she's staring at the dumb colored drawing she made, back when this all started. 

 

The bird soaring in the air. The sun rising for a new dawn. The palm trees and beach she'll never see. 

 

She grabs the picture of Pearl, her heart seizing in her chest. Crude, rudimentary, a smiling little girl in pigtails, who loved her so much she almost damned herself for her. Pearl, who probably watched every single stream, no matter how horrifying. 

 

Tana shuts her eyes— 

 

_ goodbye _

 

—and rips the image in half. 

 

She glances back at Gavriel and Aidan, watching her with matching wary red gazes, like she's still dangerous, like she still may snap and bite at them, and she is, she knows,  _ nothing is as hungry as a newborn vampire.  _

 

She shudders, full body. Her body surges with new power, but she's still hollow and empty, her insides begging to be warm again. 

 

“Tana,” Gavriel says, there's something heavy and somber in his voice that makes Tana wanna scream.  

 

He comes closer, a little madder than Aidan. 

 

“Are you mad at me?” she asks, voice shaking, trembling with the force of her hunger, trying to contain it. “Disappointed? I failed. I couldn't be your Ivan.”

 

He shakes his head. “I never asked you to be,” he says. He glances over his shoulder at Aidan, still on the ground, licking blood off his hands, like it's sticky sweet popsicle juice. 

 

“I'm a little mad at him,” Gavriel says, his too wide mouth twisting into an angry grimace. “There's a reason I asked you not to visit.” 

 

“She wanted to turn! Right, Tana? People can change their mind.” Aiden looks up at her, asking her to take his side, eyes entreating. Then softer, less belligerent. “She was tearing herself apart.”

 

“That's a noble story,” he says. “But a story. Did you not want to share in your damnation? In hopes it'd be easier to endure eternity, to condemn a familiar face alongside you?”

 

“It's not his fault,” she says, flatly, struggling to focus. “I hurt him. I tricked him. I'm the monster in the basement.”

 

She laughs then, a low hollow noise in her chest, thinking about the train that nearly hit her, so close she shook with its vibrations before diving out or the way. Thinking about the boy she and Aidan kissed and touched together, the adrenaline surging through her. Life flashing before her eyes: her father telling her not to come home if she was infected, the rolling twisted pleasure of making a nihilistic bad choice, just out of spite, just because she could. 

 

Choose her own path to hell. 

 

“Tana?” Gavriel asks. 

 

“Your blood is singing to me,” she says, kneeling forward towards Gavriel’s wrist, his wound closed up but still painted red and appetizing. Tana licks as a long swipe up his pale skin before she bites down on the spot Aidan had fed from. 

 

Gavriel gasps but he doesn't pull away. Tana gets a sick thrill out of being able to make him gasp, cry out as she bites with sharper teeth. Gavriel’s blood is like an inferno, hot flames spreading outside her, the power in his blood making her body sing and purr and unfurl. No wonder Aiden looked orgasmic. 

 

Some outside part of her knows she's acting wild, feral, a tiger trapped too long in a cage, desperate to be fed—that she's better than this,  _ pull it together,  _ but she doesn't know how to stop anymore. 

 

The brake lines have been cut. Training wheels off. 

 

“You gotta help her. She needs to feed,” Aidan says behind them, standing up, and it's so odd, to hear him talking like a vampire, and not a teenage boy. “And I'm not doing so hot either.”

 

She pulls herself away, grabbing on to Gavriel to steady herself, holding on to the hem of his shirt. 

 

“And you won't be if you keep letting us drink from you,” Aidan says. He's using that persuasive voice of his, the one that could get Tana to do so many things against her better judgement.  _ Seducing _ Gavriel, or her, or both of them. His gait is unsteady, drunk or weak, she's not sure, but he presses himself against Gavriel’s back, leaning down to nuzzle the back of his neck.  

 

Gavriel moans, soft, as Aidan kisses him, opened mouth and hungry, along the nape of his neck. His eyes fall shut, like he's forgotten where he is.

 

Tana shudders at the sight. She can feel Gavriel’s cock stirring against her, driving her dizzy and giddy with hunger, hungry for all sorts of things. Her body  _ works  _ again, it seems, no longer falling apart, arousal pulling in her belly and between her thighs. 

 

“Aidan,” Gavriel says, inclining his head towards him, a note of protest in his voice. 

 

Aidan opens his eyes, spotting the motions of his mouth, glancing at Gavriel, then Tana. His scarlet eyes are heavy and dark—the smell of blood is driving them all a little loose around the edges. 

 

“Tana, can I kiss your boyfriend?” he asks. 

 

She almost laughs. Sex chicken. 

 

Instead of answering, she pulls herself up and kisses Aidan over his shoulder, hard and messy. She presses tight against them as much as she can, Gavriel’s blood blooming heavy between them both, Aidan groaning into her mouth.

 

Gavriel’s blood, hot in her belly. Gavriel himself, groaning in between them, head lolling down until his hair tickles her skin and his fangs scrape her throat. 

 

She bites down on Aidan’s lip, feeling wicked as Aidan whines with pain and pleasure. 

 

“Stop,” Gavriel says, voice gentle but firm, tugging her away from him, pushing at first, before grabbing her chain. “We can't afford to be weakened. You can't just drink vampire blood anymore.”

 

Tana makes a low, savage noise in the back of her throat. 

 

“Fuck,” Aidan groans. Tana noses against Gavriel’s skin, finding his mouth, surging into him with desperation. All she can feel and taste is Gavriel and Aidan and the throbbing call of blood. 

 

_ These dead boys are family now _ , she thinks. 

 

When she rescued them both from the farmhouse, she didn't think they would all still be together. 

 

“Gavriel,” she gasps into his mouth when she breaks away. “I feel like I'm going to burst. I'm so tired of being hungry.”

 

Behind him, Aidan moans, nodding his head, wrapping his arms around Gavriel, needy and clingy, face buried in his shoulder. She can taste his hunger in the air, like an electric current. 

 

“I fear the only ways I have left to woo you are monstrous,” Gavriel says, nodding, mouth curved wryly. His eyes are dark, hooded, mouth smeared. He takes her face in his hands, looking at her for a long while. 

 

“There's a madness that comes upon us,” he says, echoing what he said to her long ago, with horrible crushing empathy, “and the only cure is to feed. Do you feel it, Tana?”

 

His voice is low, like they're all in a dream. 

 

Aidan looks up from Gavriel’s neck, teeth stained red and his eyes burning into her. 

 

Tana can't think, only nod.

 

Gavriel's madness making sense to her, all coming together. 

 

“Do you want us to teach you how to hunt?” he asks. 

 

Tana thinks, they're in Coldtown and there's free blood everywhere, men and women and children all eager to donate, but she can't imagine drinking any donor’s blood without tearing anybody to shreds, can't contain the savage ferocity about to burst out of her. 

 

“Yes,” she says, pressing her forehead against his, her voice thick with hunger, “yes, please.”

  
  
  
  


_   
_ _ Truth is: _ _   
_ __ I was always that kind of girl.

_ —  _ Catherynne M. Valente _ , A Silver Splendour, A Flame _

**Author's Note:**

> Animal death refer to animals Tana kills to drink blood. Self harm refers to Tana hurting herself to drink her own blood, rather than traditional depictions of self harm.


End file.
